Submitted 4 days ago by BrikoX@lemmy.zip to technology@lemmy.zip
Google announced its latest quantum chip, Willow. But what really caught the industry’s attention was a wild claim tucked into the blog post.
Google Quantum AI founder Hartmut Neven wrote in his blog post that this chip was so mind-boggling fast that it must have borrowed computational power from other universes.
“Yeah that ought to get the shareholders nice and wet.”
They’re really stretching to try make this go viral. Such a load of shit.
So it’s fine to make statements like this but it’s not fine to write an angry post on the web. Yeah makes sense. /s
There is a strange phenomenon in academia of physicists so distraught over the fact that quantum mechanics is probabilistic that they invent a whole multiverse to get around it.
Let’s say a photon hits a beam splitter and has a 25% chance of being reflected and a 75% chance of passing through. You could make this prediction deterministic if you claim the universe branches off into a grand multiverse where in 25% of the branches the photon is reflected and in 75% of the branches it passes through. The multiverse would branch off in this way with the same structure every single time, guaranteed.
Believe it or not, while they are a minority opinion, there are quite a few academics who unironically promote this idea just because they like that it restores determinism to the equations. One of them is David Deutsch who, to my knowledge, was the first to publish a paper arguing that he believed quantum computers delegate subtasks to branches of the multiverse.
It’s just not true at all that the quantum chip gives any evidence for the multiverse, because believing in the multiverse does not make any new predictions. Everyone who proposes this multiverse view (called the Many-Worlds Interpretation) do not actually believe the other branches of the multiverse would actually be detectable. It is something purely philosophical in order to restore determinism, and so there is no test you could do to confirm it. If you believe the outcome of experiments are just random and there is one universe, you would also predict that we can build quantum computers, so the invention of quantum computers in no way proves a multiuverse.
rumba@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
JFC what a fucking slimeball.
The chip is great and all, they used it to run a specially designed but useless calculation that’s hard to do in conventional computing. It’s not like the thing is going to give you the 7 septillionth digit of pi, Even the fact that it might be able to break RSA is more of a quirk in RSA than anything.